Chapter One. Devotions #2
The common enemy of Adeline had been all the Marias needed to form a blood pact for the rest of their years.
Elaine, victorious, successfully ingratiated herself with En Yi and Siew Min.
They started calling Adeline Xiao Siao, little crazy.
Elaine caught her stealing her fountain pens, so Adeline poked her hard in the arm with the evidence.
Stabbed was the word their form teacher used, while whipping Adeline’s hands with the wooden ruler, but it wasn’t Adeline’s fault the sharp point had been out.
Then the Marias had spread a rumor that Adeline kept dead birds in her bag, so Adeline had gone to the wet market before school, bought freshly severed chicken heads, and threw them, still leaking, into Elaine’s locker.
Elaine’s scream was worth Adeline getting offal on her shoes.
No one could even prove she’d done it. But Xiao Siao had carried on through secondary school, and the Marias found all sorts of things to tell everyone about her, and Adeline often, as today, spent worship envisioning them on fire.
“What’s on your shoes?” Siew Min said now.
Adeline looked down and realized her issue-white shoes were speckled with ash. She had to shuffle back through her memory to recall: the flames on her fingertips not being enough, grabbing a wad of toilet paper instead to burn into the toilet water at her feet.
“Were you smoking?” Elaine demanded, almost gleefully. She was already reaching for her booking card, a row no doubt already saved for Adeline’s name. The demerits and suspensions practically glittered in her eyes.
The unfair lot of life: how they could all wear the same starchy white blouse and hiked-up blue pinafore, tie their hair with the same dark blue ribbons, and yet around the Marias Adeline still felt like she existed the wrong way.
She’d been born in December, early and jaundiced, too eager, so her mother had made the decision to hold her back a year at school, making her one of the few girls now turning seventeen.
Adeline didn’t think it had done anything except give the Marias ammunition to tell everyone she had brain damage.
She wasn’t even convinced the Marias liked each other, but she couldn’t deny they were more powerful together.
No matter how blatantly they flouted the rules, hiking up their skirts or painting their nails, nothing had ever touched them.
They were only more popular and more poisonous.
It was better to have friends you didn’t like than no friends at all.
It didn’t really matter what she said in reply to Elaine’s question, in the same way that a cat didn’t care which way the mouse twisted. But Adeline’s patience for long games had worn thin.
“Find out for yourself. Pat me down.” She threw out her arms, making Siew Min yelp.
“I don’t have cigarettes or a lighter. You want me to show you?
” She rummaged in her pockets and pelted its contents at them: her coin purse, a pen, a packet of chewing gum.
She had a reputation to uphold—one that the Marias had been very successful in helping to create—and so if they wanted crazy, they could get crazy.
She made a show of kicking off her shoes and turning them over in front of their faces, demanding, “See what you want yet?”, and relishing in their growing horror. Finally, when she tugged down the collar of her blouse to put her hand through her bra, Elaine snapped.
“Okay! Just get back to class.”
En Yi and Siew Min looked disgusted. Elaine threw Adeline one last contemptuous look and hooked her elbows around the other girls’. They flounced away, a mutter of Xiao Siao whipping around the door.
Adeline smirked as she put her shoes back on and washed the remaining ash off her hands.
She would gladly drop out of school, if not for her mother’s fervent belief in St. Mary’s vision for its students: godly women of the future.
The school led daily devotions, taught in English, and produced accomplished girls who would secure respectable, even distinguished, jobs.
It was a modern institution, and like tattoos, drugs, or long hair on men, magic was for uneducated gangsters.
It had no place in the proper city, which her mother had worked so hard to raise Adeline in.
The teachers were keeping a sharper eye out now that it was approaching seventh moon and the veil to hell was thin.
Any girl caught with talismans or suspect potions was immediately taken to task, even though the most you found around here were harmless trinkets to lose weight or encourage a boy to fall in love with them.
Most St. Mary’s girls accepted that all this was beneath their shiny badge, and should be shunned.
Adeline’s fire, however, was not these novelty magics. She’d understood that even before coming to school, thanks to her mother’s very clear rules: Keep it small, keep it hidden. She couldn’t stop, but if she followed those rules, she didn’t have to stop.
Even if her mother had.
Ash scrubbed away, Adeline grabbed her things off the floor and swiped a coat of gloss over her lips, taking her time to get to first period in the new wing.
St. Mary’s had started as a modest single room of eighteen girls whose merchant fathers donated to the school’s founding.
Its enrollment had quickly outgrown its premise, though, and so it began buying up the land around it, adding one wing and then a chapel, until the original schoolroom had to be torn down entirely to build a larger, taller one in its place.
Now with two thousand students to its name, St. Mary’s had recently added a new block of classrooms for the older girls.
There were rumors that pieces of the original schoolroom still remained—in the foundations, or perhaps in chalk dust that had stuck stubbornly to a corner.
Unlike the newer government schools erected by policy, St. Mary’s had grown from honest kinship and the mission of faith, a century’s worth of success to show in its funds.
But the enrollment was rising still, with the way families had bloomed after the war and the growing demand for English education.
The administration was talking about establishing a bigger campus.
Not an expansion this time—they had run out of neighboring land to acquire.
They would have to move all the girls somewhere else entirely.
It would be a long, disruptive, tedious affair, worse before it got better.
Thankfully, Adeline would already be gone by then.